In the final essay of his book, The Missionary Movement in Christian History, Andrew Walls discusses the shift of the world Christian movement to the southern continents and its mission implications. Things are changing. Walls writes:

The territorial “from-to” idea that underlay the older missionary movement has to give way to a concept much more like that of Christians within the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries: parallel presences in different circles and at different levels, each seeking to penetrate within and beyond its circle (258-9).

Societies and boards that trace their roots back to William Carey and 1792 must admit that things are different now. The one-way traffic of sending and giving needs to become two-way traffic of fellowship, sharing, and receiving within the global church. It is the work of God that the church of the global south, economically poorer and less educated, is doing more for the gospel reaching the nations than we are in the West. This is not an indictment, this is cause for celebration. Let us celebrate the work of God and embrace our role not as the model, but as servants of Christ and of our brethren around the world.

The task of world evangelization that formed the declared programme of the missionary movement is not over; it never is. The essentially missionary nature of the church, the essentially missionary calling of the Christian, is where be began; and perhaps the twentieth-century fading of territorial Christianity enables us to see better that recession is as much a part of Christian history as expansion, part of the vulnerability, perhaps, of the means God has ordained to make the human witness to Christ… What is changing is not the task, but the means and the mode (261, emphasis mine).